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History’s Queer Stories

Queer Studies | Volume 19

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at the University of Hagen, Germany, and teaches Literary Studies and Gender Studies at the University of Kiel, Germany.

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History’s Queer Stories

Retrieving and Navigating Homosexuality in British Fiction about the Second World War

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An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libra- ries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. The Open Access ISBN for this book is 978-3-8394-4543-3. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org.

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© 2018 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Natalie Marena Nobitz

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Introduction | 11 Quentin Crisp’s War | 11 Researching the War | 18

Stonewall and Gay Liberation | 38 Queering the Past | 49

Feminist Narrative Theory: Approach and Outline | 53 Re-Negotiating the Homosexual Problem Novel | 63 Engaging with the Literary Past | 63

Medicalization of Homosexuality: Literary Self-Regulation | 71 The Hypocrisy of Censorship | 83

Resisting Blackmail – Resisting Stigmatisation | 97 Fashioning Homosexual Relationships | 109

The Invisible Struggle: Refurbishing a Ghostly Past | 124 Nation, Masculinity and War | 135

Literature and National Propaganda | 135 One Nation Fighting a People’s War? | 146 Outsiders Inside: Imprisoning Resistance | 160 Nationalism and Religion | 167

Performances of Military Masculinities | 179 Disintegration of the Unknown Soldier Myth | 198 Queering Space, Body and Time | 207 Queer Fiction – Queer Concepts | 207 Body Space – Destabilising Gender | 216 Queering the Battlefield | 231

Challenging the Parental Home | 240

The Public Home – The Private Street: Inversion of Concepts | 253 Killing the Child as a Token of Futurity | 260

Resisting Closure | 267 Bibliography | 289 Index | 307

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It was in 2013 when I first learned about Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, about Judith Butler’s theory on gender performativity and when I began to grasp the vast and controversial landscape of gender studies. Thenceforth I was hooked. I devoured not only theories, trying to catch up on a century of engaging thoughts, but also novels that had not been part of any standardised reading list I had thus far encountered. Sarah Waters’ historical novels particularly caught my attention and I began to wonder how a history of silence and invisibility is re- trieved and represented by a modern novelist whose own lived experiences are so vastly different from her characters and settings.

This book is the result of my journey to find answers to this and other ques- tions regarding the development of a queer literary history as well as my attempt to broaden dominant knowledge of war, sexuality and gender roles. I could not have completed my work without the encouragement of Prof. Dr. Anna- Margaretha Horatschek who generously offered guidance and advice whenever needed. I also want to thank Laura Hair whose incredible patience and construc- tive criticism enabled me to continue working well beyond my limits. Whilst professional advice helps the shaping of one’s work, emotional guidance keeps the spirit sound. I therefore want to thank my parents without whom I could not have written a single word: Ihr habt immer an mich geglaubt. Danke.

Jan, für dich – mit dir.

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LD Walter Baxter, Look Down in Mercy, [1951], (Virginia: Valancourt Books, 2014)

MD Adam Fitzroy, Make Do and Mend (UK: Manifold Press, 2012) TC Mary Renault, The Charioteer, [1953], (New York: Vintage Books,

2003)

TN Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant, [1968], (London: Harper Perennial, 2007)

TNW Sarah Waters, The Night Watch (London: Virago, 2006)

TW Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness, [1928], (New York: Anchor Books, 1990)

WL Han Suyin, Winter Love, [1962], (London: Virago Press, 1994) A.R.P. Air Raid Precautions

BBC British Broadcasting Corporation Conshie/ Conchie Conscientious objector

DSO Medal Distinguished Service Order Medal GLF Gay Liberation Front

LGBTQI Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans*, Queer, Intersectional OED Oxford English Dictionary

RAF Royal Air Force

Wren/ WRNS Women’s Royal Naval Service

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so Much Offered to so Many by so Few”

Narrating War and Homosexuality

QUENTIN CRISP’S WAR

The women of London had gone butch. At all ages and on every social level, they had tak- en to uniforms – or near-uniforms. They wore jackets, trousers and sensible shoes. I could now buy easily the footwear that I had always favoured – black lace-up shoes with firm, medium heels. I became indistinguishable from a woman.

Once, as I stood at a bus stop, a policeman accused me of this. After looking me up and down for nearly a minute he asked me what I was doing.

Me: I’m waiting for a bus.

Policeman: You’re dressed as a woman.

Me (amazed): I’m wearing trousers.

Policeman: Women wear trousers.

Me: Are you blaming me because everybody else is so eccentric?

Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant (152 -153)1

As arguably the best-known example of eccentricity of his time, Quentin Crisp recaps his experiences before, during and after the Second World War in the au- to-biography The Naked Civil Servant (1968). He invites the reader to join him in being amazed, shocked, flabbergasted and in the end enlightened for having glimpsed into a world completely detached from anything considered ‘normal’.

Throughout his life, Crisp – born in Sutton, England, as Denis Charles Pratt (1908-1999) – lived as a “self-confessed”, “self-evident” (5) and consequently outcast homosexual, who wore make-up, high heels and strove for effeminacy

1 Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant, [1968], (London: Harper Perennial, 2007).

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long before signs of an organised gay liberation movement were detectable in Western Europe. His lifestyle was not only unsavoury to ‘civil society’, but also to other homosexuals, who did not identify with Crisp’s open effeminacy. This led to him being excluded from the heteronormative community as well as from its homosexual subculture. The above excerpt exemplifies Crisp’s sarcasm and sharp humour when disclosing his excluded position and his unwillingness to conform to social standards. Moreover, Crisp’s auto-biography denotes an often disengaged attitude towards the Second World War and its regulation of sub- jects, as well as his refusal to apologise for being homosexual.

After his discharge from military service in April 1940 on the grounds of

“suffer[ing] from sexual perversion” (118), a friend of Crisp’s responded to the military terminology by musing: “Shouldn’t it be ‘glorying in’?” (118) And glo- ry Crisp did: during the war he continued to live his extravagant lifestyle, which he was slightly less harassed for as the war dominated life. Crisp therefore wel- comed the imposed darkness on London, and the number of foreign soldiers and sailors entering the city because of the war. He gleefully states that “[n]ever in the history of sex was so much offered to so many by so few” (160).

However, whilst enjoying more freedoms, Crisp was excluded from the overarching discourse of combat. Self-consciously, he observes that “[p]eople did not like that sort of thing [being different] and could now add patriotism to their other less easily named reasons for hating me” (153). Rather than shaming Crisp for his homosexuality, people now censured him for not fighting. This col- lective patriotism altered the significance of class, gender, sexuality and other differentiating factors, as it emphasised the importance of distinguishing be- tween us, the fighting nation, and them, the enemy, but also the non-fighter or conscientious objector, at times of national crisis. As a non-fighter and a homo- sexual, Crisp was thus doubly marginalised and excluded from the grand narra- tive of his time. He unsurprisingly recalls the war in very different ways com- pared to those authors, who were integrated in the war effort. His auto-biography The Naked Civil Servant thus exemplifies the difficulty of categorising war sto- ries as either supportive or critical of the historical events taking place. Instead of displaying a coherent attitude, Crisp, and homosexual wartime fiction more broadly, often cover a spectrum of responses to the war that may be inherently contradictory and inconsistent.

Although Victoria Stewart rightly observes that “[t]he bringing into focus of the unfamiliar, via the narration of an individual’s experiences and memories, is […] another means by which our understanding of the historical can be deep-

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ened” 2, Crisp’s auto-biography is, to my knowledge, not being read as part of the expanding canon of Second World War writings. This lack of attention de- rives from Crisp’s narration of a war story that is disengaged from hegemonic discourse because it represents the increasing availability of sex, and the male soldier as the embodiment of homosexual fantasies. Petra Rau critically alludes to further themes often missing from hegemonic dramatisations of the Second World War:

looting, striking, or black marketeering have been written out of the popular home front narrative altogether as have conscientious objectors or pacifists, many of whom did agri- cultural or clerical work or served in the fire or ambulance service.3

What Rau’s observation most strikingly implies is a rethinking of the heroic sol- dier narrative when she detects “conscientious objectors or pacifists”, who vol- untarily passed on what Crisp sarcastically identifies as “a glorious and conven- ient death” (119) on the battlefield. In this book I will engage with four novels from different periods that concentrate on these sub-narratives identified by Rau in an effort to begin to close a glaring gap in the canonised recollection of an al- legedly homogeneous and heteronormative war: Walter Baxter’s Look Down in Mercy (1951), Mary Renault’s The Charioteer (1953), Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch (2006) and Adam Fitzroy’s Make Do and Mend (2012)4. In order to give an overview of these novels, I shall briefly summarise the most significant story- lines and character developments.

Walter Baxter’s Look Down in Mercy (1951) comes closest to what can be considered a ‘traditional’ war writing: the protagonist Anthony Kent, known as Tony, is a heterosexual, married officer, who is responsible for an English pla- toon in Burma. The battle scenes between the English army and the Japanese are brutal and capture the atrocities of war. However, Kent’s growing self-doubts over his masculine performance invest the text with a compassion for an increas- ingly compromised protagonist. When Kent additionally becomes conscious of his attraction to his batman Anson, the novel devastates heteronormative pa-

2 Victoria Stewart, The Second World War in Contemporary British Fiction: Secret Histories (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), p. 14.

3 Petra Rau (ed.), Long Shadows: The Second World War in British Fiction and Film (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2016), p. 7.

4 Walter Baxter, Look Down in Mercy, [1951], (Virginia: Valancourt Books, 2014), Mary Renault, The Charioteer, [1953], (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), Sarah Wa- ters, The Night Watch (London: Virago, 2006) and Adam Fitzroy, Make Do and Mend (UK: Manifold Press, 2012).

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rameters of war fiction by illustrating the transformation of Kent’s identity from being a married officer to a homosexual war victim. Look Down in Mercy con- sequently challenges traditional accounts of the war, in favour of negotiating homosexuality at times of extraordinary circumstances.

Mary Renault’s The Charioteer (1953) portrays a group of conscientious ob- jectors who condemn the war due to their Quaker beliefs.5 They perform alterna- tive service as male orderlies in a hospital where the protagonist Laurie Odell (sometimes called Spud) is recovering from a knee injury incurred at the battle of Dunkirk. Laurie immediately falls in love with the young orderly Andrew Raynes, but because Laurie does not want to sacrifice Andrew’s innocence, their love remains an abstract fantasy. The protagonist instead re-encounters Ralph Lanyon, his schoolboy crush, who introduces him to the homosexual subculture.

Despite latently associating with these “advanced psychopaths” (199) – as Lau- rie calls them, signalling his strong aversion to effeminate homosexuals – neither Ralph nor Laurie want to fully identify with its promiscuity and flamboyancy.

Laurie has to consequentially find a way of living up to his self-imposed stand- ards of morality and integrity, which leaves him with few opportunities and eventually drives him away from Andrew and into the arms of Ralph.

In Adam Fitzroy’s Make Do and Mend (2012), the protagonist Harry Lyon has a similar choice to make: he can either plunge into the homosexual subcul- ture that is depicted in even more voyeuristic and promiscuous terms than in The Charioteer or enlighten the innocent farm labourer Jim Brynawel about his love for him. When Harry returns home on convalescent leave to his family estate in Wales called Hendra, he encounters Jim for the first time. Harry is immediately attracted to Jim and confesses his homosexuality, which enables the two men to fashion a relationship in surprisingly open terms. I am approaching Make Do and Mend as a modern re-write of Renault’s novel that opts for an idealistic ending to signal its liberationist consciousness.

Contrasting Make Do and Mend, Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch (2006) tries to be less obviously invested in its modern mindset and captures the lives of five

5 The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines Quaker as: “A member of the Reli- gious Society of Friends, a religious movement founded by the Christian preacher George Fox in 1648–50, and distinguished by its emphasis on the direct relationship of the individual with the divine, and its rejection of sacraments, ordained ministry, and set forms of worship. The Society is also noted for pacifist principles and an em- phasis on simplicity of life, formerly particularly associated with plainness of dress and speech. The name has never been officially adopted by the Friends themselves, but is not now regarded as a derogatory term.” “Quaker, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2017. Web. 31 August 2017.

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protagonists in more bleak ways than Fitzroy’s novel. Proceeding back in time, The Night Watch consists of three parts moving from 1947 to 1944 and conclud- ing in 1941. The characters Vivian (Viv) Pearce, Duncan Pearce, Helen Geniver, Julia Standing and Kay Langrish are variously connected and form interlinking bonds with each other. Viv is having an illicit affair with Reggie Nigri, who is a married soldier with two children. Their relationship begins with a chance en- counter in a toilet stall on a train and subsequently takes place in various shabby hotel rooms ending with a botched abortion that almost kills Viv. Her brother Duncan Pearce has been convicted of attempted suicide and experiences the war behind prison bars. His past and sexuality are unknown for most of the novel, which substantiate the air of secrecy surrounding him. After the war, Duncan lives with Mr Mundy (a former prison guard), because his shameful history leads to his self-imposed exclusion from his childhood home. Duncan’s relationship with Mr Mundy is governed by dependence and sexual assault until he re- encounters his former cell-mate Robert Fraser and falls in love with him. Not re- turning Duncan’s affection, Fraser is instead attracted to Duncan’s sister Viv, who is no longer involved with Reggie because she cannot forgive him for aban- doning her after the abortion of their unwanted child. Rather than Reggie, it is the ambulance driver Kay who rescues Viv and gives her a ring to simultaneous- ly conceal that Viv is not married, and that the alleged miscarriage was in fact an illegal abortion. Kay is in a lesbian relationship with Helen Giniver and the ring symbolises their unconventional love in the most conventional form. Helen later starts an affair with Julia Standing, a novelist who once was in love with Kay.

The tragic love triangle between Kay, Helen and Julia leaves all involved unhap- py and alone in the end. Since Duncan’s love for Fraser is equally left unrequit- ed, it seems that The Night Watch depicts homosexuality as failing. Viv, in con- trast, becomes involved in a heteronormative relationship with Fraser that can be lived out in the street and does not need concealment like her affair with Reggie.

However, Duncan is happy for his sister and the failure of Kay, Helen and Julia’s relationships derives from their dishonesty and betrayal, which suggests a critique of modern, superficial relationships. Consequently, Waters’ retrospec- tive narrative infiltrates contemporary issues into a Second World War setting, to the effect of questioning both its heteronormative literary representation and modern conceptions of homosexuality, relationships and lifestyles.

Whilst these four novels form the centre of my analysis in this study, I am giving Quentin Crisp’s The Naked Civil Servant leading position in this opening chapter in order to demonstrate that there is a variety of writings of and about the Second World War remarkably unaccounted for. It also shows that the selected novels can only stand as examples for an unknown number of other neglected

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works that are not discussed here. Crisp’s experiences during the war begin to bring into conversation the seemingly oppositional parameters of homosexuality and warfare. In order to elaborate on this controversial relationship, this study will focus on how the four novels represent homosexuality at times of war and to what extent the fictionalisation of same-sex desire challenges wartime order grounded in gender segregation. What effect has the scale of destruction on the characters’ performance of gender when various scripts of peacetime heteronor- mativity lose their determining footing? At what point is the narrative of national patriotism, deriving its traction from a communal feeling of fighting in a Peo- ple’s War, challenged, and how does this collapse facilitate a re-negotiation of men’s role during the war? In order to situate the novels into a broader frame- work with regard to their time of publication I will additionally analyse the place of pre-Stonewall literature within a growing canon of gay and lesbian fiction by asking if novels of the 1950s indeed rehearse a narrative of stigmatisation deriv- ing from the homophobic discourse in which they were written. Can historical fiction refurbish a homosexual past in less woebegone language, or is it con- demned to inscribe a modern consciousness into past times making it a deriva- tive haunted by the present?

I will pursue a two-fold approach in answering these questions by simultane- ously examining the structure of gender norms that organise social life at times of national crisis, and investigating how the novels challenge the dominant order when homosexual desire is inscribed into the discourse of war. My thesis pro- poses that the novels under discussion open scope for re-negotiating parameters that govern traditional wartime fiction such as nationalism and propaganda, in order to contest the relentless inscription of heteronormative masculinity onto the figurehead of warfare – namely the soldier. This reading against the grain of entrenched stereotypes is complemented by an analysis of the home as contro- versially protecting conservative scripts of conduct and sheltering the public from encountering deviance. In a close reading of the gendered politics of space, I shall disclose that gender norms remain deeply embedded within the founda- tion of society. Only through the symbolic as well as physical devastation of the home due to the war, can non-conforming characters begin to conceptualise an autonomous identity.

In 1970, Robin Morgan coined the term ‘herstory’ in her inspiring resistance book Sisterhood is Powerful6 to denote the long-standing restriction and subor- dination of women within society. Later, the term was used by Second Wave Feminism to demonstrate firstly the consistent focus on men’s lives when writ-

6 Robin Morgan, Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement (New York: Random House, 1970).

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ing history, and secondly to point out biases in academic research more broadly.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has included the word and defines it as a

“history emphasizing the role of women or told from a woman’s point of view;

also, a piece of historical writing by or about women”7. I propose that beyond herstory there lingers an as yet largely unrecognised queerstory that awaits re- trieval and negotiation. Investigating history’s queer stories simultaneously ena- bles a re-reading of the canon of war literature and challenges the perception of gay writings before 1969 as homophobic8, bleak and damaging for post- Stonewall gay and lesbian politics. The title of this study not only alludes to af- fectionate touches between historical fictions re-writing a homosexual past and novels written and published before Stonewall, it also points towards the multi- plicity of stories that have not yet been told. In order to place History’s Queer Stories into a wider context, I will now undertake an overview of the existing critical terrain surrounding war literature, examining in particular the retrospec- tive and retroactive function of this genre within gay and lesbian studies. This in- troduction will take its lead from two distinct positions by calling to attention first the dominance of the male authored heteronormative war narrative, and second the historical and literary amnesia of the gay community deriving from the Stonewall riots in 1969 and the formation of a modern gay consciousness in its aftermath.

7 “Herstory, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, September 2016. Web. 6 Octo- ber 2016.

8 The term homophobia was coined in the early 1970s by George Weinberg. “In Wein- berg’s formulation, society itself was phobic or sick, while the homosexual, to the ex- tent he was able to free himself from the ever present phobia, was healthy.” (Daniel Wickberg, “Homophobia: On the Cultural History of an Idea” in Critical Inquiry Vol.

27, No.1 (2000), p. 47.) This original perception of ‘suffering’ from homophobia has quite a different ring to it than contemporary understanding, where the homosexual, in comparison to the heterosexual subject, remains fixed within the terminology of devi- ance and illness. The changing connotation illustrates that meaning is constantly in flux, which necessitates a thorough investigation of influential discourses on those who produce texts.

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RESEARCHING THE WAR THE SILENT WAR

Quentin Crisp’s The Naked Civil Servant, published 1968, does not contain any typical references to the war such as the Blitz9, or London’s endurance character- ised by its people coming together to fight a common enemy. Instead of re- telling the horrors of war, Crisp polemically focuses on its positive side effects, specifically the rising number of art students, which the war seemed to produce, guaranteeing his employment as a model. His recollection of the time reads like an antithetical war story, indicated by his style of narration that challenges the mainstream parlance of inevitable devastation: “Perhaps drawing was a pleasant distraction from the bombs before which some people tended to go to pieces.”

(135) Disengaged from the danger of air raids, notable in his formulation “peo- ple tended to go to pieces”, Crisp’s comprehension of wartime is mostly shaped by the pleasure of having a job and of playing a part in the flourishing produc- tion of paintings as a reaction to the destructive force of bombs. His light- heartedness and involvement in art stands in direct contrast to how the war has been represented in scholarly research from the second half of the 20th century until the 1990s. During this period, it was assumed that the horrors of the time could not find aesthetic expression, that “[w]ar and culture are posited as anti- thetical”10. This antithesis has led to the presumption that there is virtually no lit- erature written during the war years. In Women’s Fiction of the Second World War, Gill Plain re-states this perception when saying: “The Second World War opened to the sound of silence, and the fragmented voices that later arose never achieved the cohesion of a single identifiable literary movement.”11 Plain’s latest work, Literature of the 1940s, accounts for this silence by evaluating how au- thors such as Elizabeth Bowen perceived the changing “parameters of ‘war writ- ing’”12: “In every form, from the direct statement that the acts of war are inde-

9 Petra Rau explains: “In Britain, ‘the Blitz’ stands for the prolonged aerial attack on cities and ports over nine months from September 1940 to May 1941”. For further in- formation see Rau (2016), p. 4.

10 Mark Rawlinson, British Writing of the Second World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 9.

11 Gill Plain, Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), p. 1-2.

12 Gill Plain, Literature of the 1940s: War, Post-war and ‘Peace’ (Edinburgh: Edin- burgh University Press, 2013), p. 8.

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scribable, to metaphorical conceits of impossible reversals and unimaginable juxtapositions, there is an epic history of writers’ acknowledgement that war de- fies representation.”13 Plain concludes that the perception of the non-literary war was not fashioned retrospectively and retroactively by scholars, but derived from authors themselves, who found it difficult to narrate the war – to put language to the unspeakable. Instead of literature, cinema was “the characteristic form of the 1940s, and new media was similarly dominant in the reporting of war and its af- termath”14. Radio served as a vital medium and brought news of the war to re- mote corners of the nation. It follows that the Second World War is constructed as a medial rather than a literary period, in contrast to the First World War’s em- bedment in fictionalisations.15

Angus Calder’s The People’s War published in 1969 is clearly informed by the prevailing perspective of his time that the Second World War was a largely non-literary period. He claims that “very few memorable works of fiction or drama emerged during the war itself”16, because if writers continued to find the time to practice their profession, they most often wrote propaganda or contented themselves with brevity in short stories, documentaries or poems. Calder’s asser- tion details that it is particularly novels and drama that was thought to be absent from consciousness. Similar to Plain’s evaluation that the cinema was a popular form of aesthetic expression, shorter literary texts, in addition to letters and diary entries, were continuously produced throughout the war – sometimes with more vigour than during peacetime resulting from the separation of lovers or married couples and from the distance between sons or fathers and their families. Kris- tine A. Miller’s study on British Literature of the Blitz affirms that “[a]t no other moment in history have so many British citizens felt compelled to write so ex- tensively about their daily lives and ideas”17. Her findings resonate with Calder’s revision of the Second War as a non-novelistic rather than a non-literary period.

13 Plain, (2013), p. 8. Plain later refines this statement by stating: “In spite of the war’s disruptive influence, the decade produced some rich and rewarding fiction.” p. 23.

14 Plain, (2013), p. 4.

15 “Dem literarischen’ Ersten Weltkrieg steht dann der (massen-)mediale’ Zweite Weltkrieg gegenüber.” Zeno Ackermann, Gedächtnis-Fiktionen: Mediale Erin- nerungsfiguren und literarischer Eigensinn in britischen Romanen zum Zweiten Welt- krieg (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2015), p. 19.

16 Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939-1945 (London: Pimlico, 1969), p. 513.

Plain similarity argues that “it is the short story that demands to be recognised as the characteristic ‘form’ of the decade.” Plain, (2013), p. 24.

17 Kristine A. Miller, British Literature of the Blitz: Fighting the People’s War (Hamp- shire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 4.

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Consequently, different forms of writing were produced during the war period, but scholarly research was slow to recognise their importance. This slow recog- nition is also evident in Plain’s refined statement that “[i]n spite of the war’s dis- ruptive influence, the decade produced some rich and rewarding fiction.”18 How- ever, it was not until the turn of the century, largely due to the expanding number of feminist investigations into the Second World War, that scholars such as Plain began to carefully revise the apparently silent canon of Second World War fic- tion.

Damon Marcel DeCoste’s essay “The Literary Response to the Second World War” explains this misconception of the silent war to arise from the fact that “novelistic responses to that war do not fit the model for war writing be- queathed to literary scholars by the Great War”19. Whilst Calder’s observation has corrected the non-literary war into the non-novelistic war, DeCoste asserts that novelistic texts were as much produced in the 1940s as during the First World War, but that the status of the author had changed drastically. His evalua- tion shows that there is not a lack of novelistic material to draw from, that war and culture are not mutually exclusive, but rather, that this material does not originate from the soldier as author and authority of the front. Unlike the First World War, literary responses to the 1940s parted with the ‘soldier poet’ to in- clude a range of diverse voices unheard (of) or silenced in the recollections of the Great War.20 Not only was the ideology of the fighting soldier protecting hearth and home shattered by the nightly endangerment of civil society, includ- ing his family, his authority for having seen the effects of the war at close quar- ters was also no longer needed for (re-)telling its stories. DeCoste concludes that

“[r]ather than the testimony of infantrymen disillusioned by combat, British fic- tion of the Second World War offers us the war away from the front, and espe- cially on the home front”21. This shifted authorship and setting originated from the influence of the Blitz on civilians and adds a new dimension to the wartime paradigm when making virtually everyone a prime witness.

Miller observes that “[b]efore 1943, more British civilians than soldiers had been killed or wounded; by the end of the war, civilian fatalities equaled almost 25 percent of military fatalities, while the number of wounded civilians was

18 Plain, (2013), p. 23.

19 Damon Marcel DeCoste, “The Literary Response to the Second World War” in Brian W. Schaffer (ed.), A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945-2000 (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), p. 7.

20 Ackermann, (2015), p. 19.

21 DeCoste, (2005), p. 4.

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more than 33 percent of the number of wounded soldiers.”22 This large number of civilian casualties changed the parameters of war writings. Whilst the lan- guage of threat, devastation and suffering characterised the situation of the sol- dier in narratives during the First World War, it became more universally used during the Second World War. Being exposed to the Blitz, letters by civilians to husbands, fathers and lovers became as much testimony of violence, as the sol- diers’ experiences at the front. This proximity significantly “transformed [the]

communication between soldiers and civilians”23 as their respective rhetoric be- came almost indistinguishable. Consequently, the Second World War produced a greater variety of writings by people from the home front, but they were not acknowledged as literature by those critics who were searching for the kind of texts produced during and in response to the First World War. These prototype texts were mostly ‘realist’ representations of the war, or rather what readers and critics “expected it to be”24. Ann-Marie Einhaus contends that “[n]ot formal in- novation but the ‘correct’ ideological stance on the war qualifies a text for inclu- sion in [the] cultural canon”25: “they have to tick the right boxes in what they say about the war: disillusionment, horror, camaraderie in the trenches”26. Einhaus’

evaluation buttresses the theory that wartime writing is traditionally synonymous with soldier experiences as well as tightly linked with nationalism and propa- ganda. Due to the unprecedented scale of the Second World War these core qual- ities were shaken, which led to an uncertainty over the distinguishing markers of Second World War literature.

THE PEOPLES WAR

In addition to the confusion over a literary canon on Second World War litera- ture caused by an enlarged authorship, patriotism and propaganda were received less euphorically during the Second World War than before. When at the begin- ning of the century men looked with excitement towards the opportunity of fighting for their country, the second generation of soldiers, who often remem- bered the disastrousness of the First World War, identified with their roles in the military more reluctantly. The scale of destruction at the home front additionally led to critical voices questioning Britain’s leadership. In order to maintain con-

22 Miller, (2009), p. 2.

23 Miller, (2009), pp. 4-5.

24 Ann-Marie Einhaus, “Modernism, Truth, and the Canon of First World War Litera- ture” in Modernist Cultures Vol. 6, No. 2 (2011), p. 299.

25 Einhaus, (2011), p. 298.

26 Ibid., p. 299.

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trol, “[p]oliticians and the media emphasized the [apparently] unifying and level- ling power of the Blitz” by claiming that the People’s War would bring forth

“changes in gender roles and class relations [which] might lead to post-war so- cial reform”27. The speech “Westward, Look, the Land is Bright” given by Prime Minister Winston Churchill highlights these aspects:

The sublime but also terrible and sombre experiences and emotions of the battlefield which for centuries had been reserved for the soldiers and sailors, are now shared, for good or ill, by the entire population. All are proud to be under fire of the enemy. [...] This is indeed the grand heroic period of our history, and the light of glory shines on all.28 The emphasis in the first sentence lies on the word ‘sublime’, which gives Churchill’s speech an immediate sense of advocating something noble to the ef- fect of not simply raising the cause he supports into higher spheres, making it just, necessary and beyond reproach, but also elevating the speaker himself. Nei- ther the war nor Churchill can be exposed to criticism as it is an almost divine power that guides them. Thus, disguising the horrors of war, Churchill’s style of speaking functions to vindicate a political power that leaves British citizens suf- fering. The word “sublime” is positioned at the beginning for emphasis and hov- ers as a modifier separated from its object until it is connected to the “experienc- es and emotions of the battlefield”. That this battlefield is not exclusively sub- lime but also “terrible and sombre” is eclipsed by Churchill’s syntax, which di- rects the focus to the beginning, rather than the middle, of the sentence. Yet, the

“terrible and sombre” is not forgotten, it is acknowledged as a ‘side-effect’ with- out tarnishing the overall good of the war. Most importantly, the horrors are

“shared [...] by the entire population”, a unifying trope which constitutes the core of Churchill’s message. It is no longer the soldier and the sailor, the male sex, who finds his honourable death on the faraway battlefield, but virtually every- body – women, children, old and young of all classes. The People’s War on Brit- ish ground becomes almost more significant than the front lines. “Proud to be under fire of the enemy”, these citizens need to recognise their efforts and deaths as sublime, just like the soldier needs to accept the battlefield as his potential grave. To be sure that the people’s suffering will not be in vain, Churchill pledg- es “the light of glory shines on all”. It remains unclear what this glory constitutes of, but surely it will be sublime. Sonya O. Rose argues in Which People’s War

27 Miller, (2009), p. 1.

28 Winston Churchill, “‘Westward, Look, the Land is Bright,’ Address Broadcast April 27, 1941” in Charles Eade (ed.), The Unrelenting Struggle (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1942), p. 93.

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that this kind of rhetoric is a strategy “deployed to manage or organize the dif- ferences among people that have come to be sites of collective identity formation so that individuals see themselves as national beings regardless of their other loyalties and preoccupations”29. Churchill aims to unify Britons against a com- mon enemy beyond class, gender or other differences.

However, rather than eliminating social distinctions, the Blitz brought them to light when people (most often women and children) waited in various kinds of shelters of varying quality depending on their social standing. Rau agrees that

“[c]lass divisions remained visible and palpable throughout the war, which is why propaganda worked so hard to convince everyone that they had to be over- come if the war was to be won”30.Despite these efforts, individual war writings – letters, diaries, novels, short stories, etc. – demonstrate “an expression of imagi- native freedom to disagree about the People’s War”31. These texts represent the fracturing of British society and people’s diverging attitudes towards the war.

Miller concludes that “the imaginative representation of vastly different blitz ex- periences was an essential part of wartime life across social strata in British cul- ture”32. It follows that there are rich accounts of and about the Second World War that negotiate individual perspectives of a collective event to subvert the dominant narrative of the People’s War.

Crisp’s response to the Government’s propaganda is initially enthusiastic when he exclaims: “though some of the buildings [in London] had been ruined, most of the people had been improved. Everyone talked to everyone – even to me.” (152) His allegory between ruined buildings and improved people illus- trates a strange aestheticization of wartime, and he unwittingly recites People’s War rhetoric when saying that despite bombed out and collapsed houses indicat- ing the horrors of war, solidarity appears to be growing among Britons. Their lessened aversion against Crisp startles but delights him: it seems that despite its atrocity, the war has improved his life.

However, Crisp realises that his initial evaluation of change was premature because “[i]t was only superficially and only by day that strangers were friendly”

(153). This statement displays Crisp’s disappointment in discovering that the

29 Sonya O. Rose, Which People’s War?: National Identity and Citizenship in Britain 1939-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 9.

30 Rau, (2016), p. 6.

31 Miller, (2009), p. 11.

32 Miller, (2009), p. 11. For further information see Calder, (1969) and Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz, [1991], (London: Pimlico, 1992). Similar to Miller, he analyses how people’s personal lives were much too diverse to assume a coherent contribution to and belief in a People’s War.

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People’s War was an increasingly failing fabrication. Differences were not over- come that easily, neither regarding class, let alone gender and sexuality. At one point, Crisp is severely beaten up in a train for no other reason than his effemi- nate looks, revealing how prejudices of various kinds continued to prosper. Con- sequently, whilst at times positive in their description of war circumstances, in- dividual accounts such as The Naked Civil Servant remain to be infused with

“conflicting discourses” 33, both welcoming and criticising the People’s War, which contributes to the difficulties when trying to establish a coherent canon of Second World War literature.

THE GENDERED WAR

Whereas People’s War propaganda sought to unite British citizens by declaring an end to social and gender differences, the military was paradoxically built on a stereotypical segregation of gender. Karen Schneider’s Loving Arms shows that

“[t]he assumption that war literature is properly written by and about men stems from the widespread if not altogether accurate identification of war as an essen- tially male activity and aggressive masculinity as an ontological condition”34. However, the following chapters will show that masculinity as such is a far less stable concept than the military portrays it to be, and that the potential of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has coined “homosocial desire”35 challenges the mili- tary’s heteronormative self-image. The historian Allan Bérubé, who devoted his career researching and interviewing homosexual veterans of the Second World War, explains that in order to countermand any narratives that might threaten the masculine ideology of war, the US army and Navy developed screening process- es to ‘spot’ homosexuals – a practice that had been unheard of during the First World War.36 The detection of deviating sexualities within the military followed

33 Miller, (2009), p. 12.

34 Karen Schneider, Loving Arms: British Women Writing the Second World War, [1997], (Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 2015), p. 4.

35 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial De- sire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

36 Allan Bérubé, My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History (Capel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011), p. 90. Carol Cohn also ar- gues that the “U.S. armed forces have had policies prohibiting homosexuals from serving only since the beginning of World War II.” Carol Cohn, “Gays in the Military:

Texts and Subtexts” in Marysia Zalewski and Jane Parpart (eds.), The ‘Man Question’

in International Relations, [1997], (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1998), p.

129).

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the assumptions that homosexuality was an illness that was thought to negatively influence the performance of men during battle.37 Such a categorical discharge of a group of men was only possible because homosexuality was considered to be a

‘core identity’. This ‘argument’ is a relatively recent phenomenon that is aptly summarised by Michel Foucault:

the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized [...]. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sex- uality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androg- yny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.38

Foucault argues that “the practice of sodomy” – by which he means sexual acts between men – was transformed by “psychological, psychiatric [and] medical”

discourse into “a kind of interior androgyny” – a fixed, sexual identity. Whereas ancient Greek culture did not perceive sexuality in dualistic terms, but differenti- ated men based on gender, the late 19th century paved the way for a more rigid classification that turned ‘acts’ into ‘identities’ and “the homosexual [became] a species”.Anne Fausto-Sterling details that “physicians began to publish case re- ports of homosexuality – the first in 1869 in a German publication specializing in psychiatric and nervous illness. As the scientific literature grew, specialists emerged to collect and systematize the narratives”39. The cartoon “Constructing Sex and Gender: A political, Religious and Scientific History” (Figure 1) printed

37 This ‘argument’ was still in use in 1993 when Bill Clinton lifted the prohibition on gay men serving in the military. In addition to the assumption that “gays in the mili- tary would undermine good order, discipline, and morals” (Cohn, 1998, p. 130) a newly evoked fear over their security among their homophobic peers was brought up to enforce their exclusion. Consequently, gay men are not simply unwelcome because of their alleged incompetence “but because heterosexual men do not want to serve with them” (Cohn, 1998, p. 135). The prevailing issue of HIV/AIDS and the apparent endangerment of the heterosexual soldier through blood transfusion or coming into contact with a wounded gay men, presented another line of ‘argument’ for “pro-ban sentiments” (Cohn, 1998, p. 131).

38 Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality Volume I, [1976], (London: Penguin Books, 1998), p. 43.

39 Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sex- uality (New York: Basic Books New York, 2000), pp. 13-14.

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in Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the Body illustrates that homosexuality has been con- structed differently at various periods in time. 40

Figure 1: “Constructing Sex and Gender: A Political, Religious and Scientific History...”

Building on the argument that the late 19th century brought forth a significant change in the perception of same-sex erotisation, Carol Cohn observes that this shift “from punishing individual sexual acts” to “identifying and excluding a cat- egory of person” helped to judge homosexuals “as inherently unfit” 41 to join the

40 Fausto-Sterling, (2000), p. 11.

41 Cohn, (1998), p. 130.

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military during the Second World War. Because homosexuality was understood as an identity rather than an act, a whole group of people could now be dis- charged. The newly arisen ‘problem’ with homosexuality, however, concentrated not on sexuality per se, but on those men who were “openly gay in the mili- tary”42 and able to challenge the institution’s demonstration of hegemonic mas- culinity and heterosexuality. Bérubé rightly concludes that these “screening[s], needless to say, identified only obviously effeminate men, many of whom were not gay”43. There is no absolute number of cases but relying on Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male44 and converting his findings onto the U.S.

military, Bérubé calculates that between 650,000 and 1.6 million serving men were homosexual.45 In consequence, this large number of serving homosexuals inherently challenges homogeneous wartime narratives habitually representing heteronormative soldier heroes.

Quentin Crisp’s recollection of his discharge suggests that similar screening processes focusing on gender to detect homosexuality were practised in Brit- ain46:

42 Cohn, (1998), p. 130.

43 Bérubé, (2011), p. 90. For further information see Kathy J. Phillips, Manipulating Masculinity: War and Gender in Modern British and American Literature (Basing- stoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), especially chapter three “World War II: No Lace on His Drawers”.

44 Alfred C. Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, [1948], (Bloomington and In- dianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1975).

45 Allan Bérubé “World War II” in B. R. Burg (ed.), Gay Warriors: A Documentary His- tory from the Ancient World to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 2002), p. 226.

46 Unfortunately there appears to be no equivalent study to Bérubé’s on the British mili- tary, but according to the BBC the number of homosexual men fighting for Britain ranged around 250,000. The website “WW2 People’s War: An Archive of World War Two Memories – written by the public gathered by the BBC” bases its projections on the “1990-91 National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles which found that six per cent of men report having had homosexual experiences”. BBC,

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/36/a2688636.shtml> [last ac- cessed: 06/10/2016]. For an account on gay soldiers in the Canadian army during the Second World War see Paul Jackson, One of the Boys: Homosexuality in the Military during World War II, [2004], (Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2010).

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My appearance was at half-mast. I wore no make-up and my hair was hardly more than hooligan length. […] [B]ut of course my hair was still crimson from having been persis- tently hennaed for seven years and, though my eyebrows were no longer in Indian file, it was obvious that they had been habitually plucked. These and other manifestations of ef- feminacy disturbed the board deeply. […] I was told, ‘You’ve dyed your hair. This is a sign of sexual perversion.’ (117)

It is Crisp’s outward appearance, especially his hair, which initially “disturbed the board deeply”, leading them to conclude that Crisp is homosexual. Even this moderate display of femininity performed by a male body challenges the sup- posedly dualistic gender order.47 Worse still, Crisp demonstrates that he is not ashamed of his sexuality or gender performance. By renouncing inferiority, Crisp provokes the military board whose conservative views cannot allow for sex and gender variance. He is perceived as a threat that needs to be discredited as a sexual pervert for the military board to handle their considerable irritation over finding their world-views challenged by a person they perceive as absolute- ly disgraceful. Marginalised as sexually deviant, the danger is redirected into an- other discourse, that of medicine and psychoanalysis, which can deal with Crisp without challenging the stereotypic gender order of the ‘normal world’. After this point it is no longer of interest whether or not Crisp would be physically fit to join the military, the mere fact that his gender performance does not conform to military masculinity is sufficient to reject him and thus deny him a “glorious and convenient death” (119). When fighting and dying for one’s nation means performing hegemonic masculinity, Crisp realises from his detached, sarcastic perspective that the nation at war was more prepared to let him live in effemina- cy than reward him with a death that bestows masculinity upon him.

Not only men’s lives were changed in the military or due to their discharge, women, too, saw transformations when they became active members of the war as nurses, ambulance drivers, members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS, more commonly known as Wren) or fire watchers.48 Since the home

47 I use the term dualistic according to Paechter’s definition: “A dualistic relation is one in which the subordinated term is negated, rather than the two sides being in equal balance.” Carrie Paechter, “Masculine Femininities/Feminine Masculinities: Power, Identities and Gender” in Gender and Education Vol. 18, No.3 (2006), p. 256.

48 Miller states: “In the past, soldiers had fought and died on the battlefield, while civil- ians had watched and waited at home. The Blitz transformed the relationship between home front and front line by forcing civilians to fight like soldiers and soldiers to watch and wait like civilians: now everyone was fighting and everyone knew the dan- ger that threatened loved ones.” Miller, (2009), p. 5.

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front became the chief narrative of death and survival during the Blitz, the Brit- ish Government could not afford to maintain the myth of the soldier protecting his homeland whilst the female population was awaiting his return. A subsequent speech by Churchill highlights the changing role of women at the home front and pledges that their fighting during the war will continue to find recognition in the future.

This war effort could not have been achieved if the women had not marched forward in millions and undertaken all kinds of tasks and work for which any generation but our own – unless you go back to the Stone Age – would have considered them unfitted [...]. Noth- ing has been grudged, and the bounds of women’s activities have been definitely, vastly, and permanently enlarged.49

The military term “marched” situates women directly into the war discourse and, similar to the excerpt on the People’s War, highlights civilian efforts as equally important as front line battles. The speech is thus immediately characterised as People’s War rhetoric by parading the home front alongside the battlefield.

Churchill’s use of the definite article in “the women” has a simultaneously uni- fying and degrading effect: it emphasises women as a group and constructs soli- darity among those who “marched forward in millions” to work together and to defend their country. It also treats women like objects when using the impersonal article “the”. This female unity as an indefinite force to be reckoned with is fash- ioned in order to overcome class distinctions and to promulgate the Second World War as horrible yet beneficial in its facilitation of social change. Moreo- ver, Churchill claims that “any generation but our own [...] would have consid- ered [women] unfitted” to defend Britain at the home front. Narcissistically praising the courtesy of his generation, women’s (presumably) altered social po- sition is tightly linked to the generosity of men like Churchill, who have permit- ted this change to happen for the duration of the war. That his words are not se- riously supportive of emancipation is clear when he claims that “[n]othing has been grudged”. Because it is simply not true that “nothing has been grudged”, as will be illustrated in the analysis of the mannish lesbian Kay in The Night Watch, Churchill’s emphasis becomes implausible. Building on this note of doubt, his assertion that “the bounds of women’s activities have been definitely, vastly, and permanently enlarged” appears similarly weak. Striking is that these “bounds of women’s activities” are not equal to men’s but have been “enlarged”. ‘Enlarged

49 Winston Churchill, “The Women of Britain” in Charles Eade (ed.), Onwards to Victo- ry: War speeches by the Right HON. Winston S. Churchill (London: Cassell and Company Ltd., 1944), p. 285.

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to what?’ one immediately wants to ask. Churchill leaves this question unan- swered and instead speaks of “a far more complete equalisation of the parts to be played by men and women in society”50, which is as revealing as women’s “en- larged” activities, leaving open the question: why not complete equalisation?

From the end of the 20th century, literary studies began to consider how Churchill’s promises might be reflected in wartime writings by disregarding conventional narratives of the male soldier at the front, to instead focus on wom- en’s voices and female experiences. Works like Gill Plain’s Women’s Fiction of the Second World War and Karen Schneider’s Loving Arms contribute to a con- tinually growing body of feminist writing aimed at reclaiming a male dominated past. 51 Schneider seeks to expose the symbiotic connection between war as a masculine endeavour and “gender-encoded ideology” 52 more broadly. Her eval- uation deliberately breaks with male-centred analyses of war literature when fo- cusing on fiction written by female authors, featuring female protagonists who tell a story of war from a female perspective. She claims:

if we are to know an ‘other’ story of war – if we are to denaturalize the gender-encoding implicit in war and its stories, if we are to consider their ideological power for individuals, cultures, and humanity at large, if we are to understand without illusions the seduction of loving arms, then we must hear the war stories women tell.53

Schneider’s analysis of works by Stevie Smith, Katharine Burdekin, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and Doris Lessing renders visible other wartime voices and seeks to reveal the ambivalence with which women of the time perceived the war: caught between patriotism, nationalism, pacifism and their role as female novelists. Due to the enlarged scope of possibilities for women, including trans- formed feminine fashion and behaviours, gender norms where simultaneously more relaxed yet increasingly patrolled by a Government that feared the emanci- pation of its subordinated subjects. Schneider concludes that “[b]ecause of the war’s double threat to the stability and legitimacy of its own sex-gender system, Britain’s patriarchal hegemony made every attempt to (re)assert its political and

50 Churchill, (1944), p. 224.

51 For an account on women’s private correspondences and their perception of the war’s influence on their lives see Jenny Hartley, Millions like Us: British Women’s Fiction of the Second World War (London: Virago, 1997) and Phyllis Lassner, British Women Writers of World War II: Battlegrounds of their Own (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998).

52 Schneider, (2015), p. 3.

53 Ibid., pp. 5-6.

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narrative authority over the feminine (feminized) Other.”54 Whereas Plain care- fully suggests that “[w]ar can be understood in metaphorical terms as a transcen- dental deconstructor, with the power to overshadow, disrupt and displace all oth- er discourses”55, Schneider articulates the many ways in which conventions re- garding gender not only prevailed, but became reified at a time where stability was hard to come by otherwise. She argues that the common narrative of subor- dinating the feminine is rehearsed and strengthened in the greater conflict be- tween Britain and Germany when two “patriarchal nations [are] quarreling about which is the better man, which can force the (feminizing) surrender of the oth- er”56. Schneider’s polemic but insightful remark exposes the ever-present gen- der-game as a determining factor at times of peace, but more so during war.

Contradicting her earlier assertion that war is a “transcendental deconstruc- tor” that “overshadow[s], disrupt[s] and displace[s] all other discourses”, Plain ultimately agrees with Schneider when claiming that “[t]he patriarchal system [...] stands firm despite the chaos of war”57. Whilst doubting that the war altered dominant gender roles, Plain concedes that it brought forth an alteration in the distribution of masculine power.58 This means that instead of replicating the “he- gemony of masculinity” as conducted by First World War literature, narratives of the Second World War often concern themselves with the “hegemony of mas- culine power”59. In Plain’s account, masculinity was no longer just performed by men but also by women. Regardless of this relaxation in the performance of gender norms, Plain evaluates women’s writing of the Second World War to re- veal how they were “asked to assume temporarily the semblance of masculinity – to act like men, but to remain constantly aware of their femininity”60. The war did not liberate women from their imposed femininity, nor did it attribute a last- ing masculinity to their bodies. It only allowed for brief alterations of heter- onormative conventions for the sake of winning the war. Both Plain and Schnei- der thus point towards the difficult position British women had to adopt during the war and the force with which parameters of ‘decent gender’ prevailed.

That Crisp who believes himself to be “indistinguishable from a woman”, is challenged by a policeman for his effeminate outfit, exemplifies the ambivalence with which wartime society perceived and greeted altered gender norms. His ap-

54 Schneider, (2015), p. 26.

55 Plain, (1996), p.22.

56 Schneider, (2015), p. 26.

57 Plain, (1996), p. 26.

58 Ibid., p. 26.

59 Ibid., p. 27, [emphasis original].

60 Ibid., p, 28, [emphasis original].

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pearance demonstrates what Judith Butler decades later will come to famously call ‘gender performativity’ which “revolves around [...] the way in which the anticipation of a gendered essence produces that which it posits as outside it- self”61. Gender performativity is not a conscious decision or a translation of a gender essence but “a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization in the context of a body”62. The body becomes the surface on which the socio-historical as well as cultural regulation of subjects is marked in terms of (non-)conformity. According to Butler, any claim for an inner core or gender identity is a misleading conception deriving from the fantasy of sex- gender coherence, meaning the deceptive ideology that one’s gender automati- cally follows one’s sexed body: biological women are seen as feminine whilst biological men are regarded as masculine. Butler continues arguing that the dis- cursive power structures that render a subject intelligible produce gender as a mechanism of control and regulation.

A subject’s wish for recognition is followed by the consequential threat of qualifying the opposite as the Other, the “less-than-human”63. The power rela- tions that regulate, who becomes a recognisable human are also those that prom- ulgate a normative system to punish those who “misbehave”64.The relation be- tween the human and the less-than human puts the discourse of power into a del- icate but ultimately asymmetrical balance in which elements of norm and Other are mutually dependant and at the same time transgressive over time and space.

“As a result, the ‘I’ that I am finds itself at once constituted by norms and de- pendant on them but also endeavours to live in ways that maintain a critical and transformative relation to them.”65 Accordingly, subjects are constituted to per- form gender without recognising it as a performance and, at the same time, need to make these performances visible in order to change them. “[T]o intervene in the name of transformation means precisely to disrupt what has become settled knowledge and knowable reality, and to use, as it were, one’s unreality to make an otherwise impossible or illegible claim.”66

In perceiving himself as “indistinguishable from a woman”, Crisp makes such a claim and challenges the assumption of sex-gender coherence to disclose the perception of gender identity as illusionary. His cross-dressing is not a per-

61 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, [1990], (New York and London: Routledge Classics, 2006), p. xv.

62 Ibid., p. xv.

63 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 2.

64 Butler, (2004), p. 25.

65 Ibid., p. 3.

66 Ibid., p. 27.

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